Thanks,
I am showing finished work. I think I mentioned the set of tests I am running next up is with the same tubes, adjustable bias, lower grid resistors, better shielding, and a cleaner power supply.
I want to show as many varients as possible till I get bored.
ES
Methinks you are painting with a very wide brush.. We try to be fair, and some things do slip through.
Now for the official moderator stance, some of you guys need to cool it. Personal insults are not acceptable behavior and I will go through the thread when I have more time and delete the offending material. Joshua another such comment about moderation will get you an infraction. (Note as well that you mis-interpreted the intent of that comment which I have not removed.)
Hi,
Sounds like this will go a long way to clear up the picture...
Sure, knock yourself out. Me I prefer straight answers to straight questions and fewer experiments.
Ciao T
Sounds like this will go a long way to clear up the picture...
Sure, knock yourself out. Me I prefer straight answers to straight questions and fewer experiments.
Ciao T
Wandering around in the dark yields more surprises. Aim for the answer, but pay very careful attention to what actually happens.
You never know. As you spend more time listening (and as your system improves), you may hear things that you didn't before.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote a very interesting book that postulates that the main factor determining whether individuals excelled at something was not natural talent or formal education or anything else we might imagine. Instead, he said that one needed to put in 10,000 hours of work on something.
I'm sure that you and Barrie Gilbert have put in your 10,000 hours in IC design. Nelson Pass recently said that his current designs sound better now because he has his 10,000 hours in and he can hear things that eluded him before.
~~~~~~~~~~
People have been talking about absolute phase for decades. I tried many times to hear the difference and failed. I always felt a bit embarrassed about it, because other people (claimed they!) could. Then one day about ten years ago I was doing a listening test with a friend and we both felt something didn't sound right. He remembered that he had changed the polarity of the speaker leads a few days earlier to compensate for a preamp he was auditioning.
After he corrected the speaker leads, things sounded "right" again. This was the first time that either of us had heard any difference at all with absolute polarity. According to the accepted wisdom, the correct polarity for any given album is a 50-50 shot. So we started pulling out all kinds of discs and listening for the correct phase.
We had an unexpected result -- we could hear a difference for each CD, but in every single case, the normal polarity sounded better. After listening to around a dozen albums we got bored and left the polarity in the normal sense.
As far as absolute polarity goes, either most albums are recorded in correct polarity, or we had heard it in the "wrong" polarity so much that we just got used to it and preferred it that way, or we just got "lucky" and hit twelve "heads" in a row. My belief is the first interpretation is the correct one.
As far as listening skills go, it just demonstrates that it is a skill. And like any skill, the more you do it, the better you get at it. So even if you don't hear a difference now, you may in the future.
Slightly OT this is my "Panel" saw. I must disagree with those who think it is stupidity that causes accidents. It may add to the number but everyone can have an accident. The best way to reduce them is anticipate and remove hazards. That is why I spent money on this saw. It was the least expensive method to more safely produce parts we use.
Attachments
Simon,
Several years of working in industrial environments (and one very bad experience in an "armoured" car during a life-fire exercise in the paramilitary) have thought me two things.
1) You CANNOT remove ALL hazards completely from your environment.
2) When hazards are present, it is stupidity that causes accidents (or .57 calibre armour piercing slugs to do what they are designed for less than a foot from you).
Worse, the more hazards are removed, the more careless people get, as they are no longer used to things "being dangerous".
I am all in favour of making thing more safe, but in some ways, "more safe is actually less safe"...
Ciao T
Several years of working in industrial environments (and one very bad experience in an "armoured" car during a life-fire exercise in the paramilitary) have thought me two things.
1) You CANNOT remove ALL hazards completely from your environment.
2) When hazards are present, it is stupidity that causes accidents (or .57 calibre armour piercing slugs to do what they are designed for less than a foot from you).
Worse, the more hazards are removed, the more careless people get, as they are no longer used to things "being dangerous".
I am all in favour of making thing more safe, but in some ways, "more safe is actually less safe"...
Ciao T
I once heard of a power station manager who was concerned about accidents among contractors on site. He decreed that any contractor whose staff suffered a 'lost time' accident would have their contract cancelled. As a result, accidents did not stop happening but the victim could not go out the front gate (perhaps in an ambulance) but instead was smuggled out the back gate when nobody was looking without proper first aid. The official accident statistics looked very good, though.
I believe this is known as the principle of opposite effect.
I believe this is known as the principle of opposite effect.
Expecting, or requiring, everyone to be alert at all times isn't a reasonable expectation, it's an accident waiting to happen. A cranky baby the night before, a fight with the wife, an unexpected large bill, any of a myriad of things can cause a moment's distraction. It WILL happen, and systems must be safe even so. Firing the guy who's just lost a finger because he was (obviously) violating safe practice seems to be an ugly version of blaming the victim.
I have been mulling over the missing support block. Maybe, extremely unlikely, an interference source under the floor? Moving the power cord away from signal cords? Dielectric absorption exhibited by plastic carpet, or electrostatically induced (wrong word, sorry) micromovement of the carpet fibers???? Leaning on the equipment stand thus compressing the carpet and anchoring the stand better during the placement of the block? Placing the cord out of the reach of unusually short gremlins? Unplug and replug, wiping contacts in so doing? Move something like a lamp (maybe with a CFL bulb?) and not return it to its original position? None of these thoughts seem convincing. Did you try repeating the effect? Or just mutter "Thank God" and stagger off to bed?
I have been mulling over the missing support block. Maybe, extremely unlikely, an interference source under the floor? Moving the power cord away from signal cords? Dielectric absorption exhibited by plastic carpet, or electrostatically induced (wrong word, sorry) micromovement of the carpet fibers???? Leaning on the equipment stand thus compressing the carpet and anchoring the stand better during the placement of the block? Placing the cord out of the reach of unusually short gremlins? Unplug and replug, wiping contacts in so doing? Move something like a lamp (maybe with a CFL bulb?) and not return it to its original position? None of these thoughts seem convincing. Did you try repeating the effect? Or just mutter "Thank God" and stagger off to bed?
Not firing the victim, firing them before they lose the finger, there are about 100 close calls for every accident. So first action is suspension, second is removing them from harms way.
It really does work. The folks who practice it have 1/4 the accidents of the lip service only companies!
It really does work. The folks who practice it have 1/4 the accidents of the lip service only companies!
I have been mulling over the missing support block. Maybe, extremely unlikely, an interference source under the floor? Moving the power cord away from signal cords? Dielectric absorption exhibited by plastic carpet, or electrostatically induced (wrong word, sorry) micromovement of the carpet fibers???? Leaning on the equipment stand thus compressing the carpet and anchoring the stand better during the placement of the block? Placing the cord out of the reach of unusually short gremlins? Unplug and replug, wiping contacts in so doing? Move something like a lamp (maybe with a CFL bulb?) and not return it to its original position? None of these thoughts seem convincing. Did you try repeating the effect? Or just mutter "Thank God" and stagger off to bed?
We didn't move or unplug anything. We gently lifted that section of the cable off the floor and put a wood block under it. We quit while we were ahead. I know that was the problem, so there was no need to repeat the experiment.
One time we were listening to two different production preamps that should have sounded the same. Unfortunately they didn't. These were two-box affairs with an outboard power supply. We were short of wood blocks so one of the three blocks under one of the preamps was maple instead of the normal myrtle.
We couldn't figure out why the preamps sounded different. Then we realized that we could just switch the myrtle block to the "active" preamp so that everything would be the same for both units even though we were short of myrtle blocks. When we did this, the preamps sounded the same.
One wood block out of dozens and dozens in the system, and it was under the power supply, not the analog circuitry, and we could hear the difference between two different woods.
Weird. I have no explanation whatsoever. These are solid-state preamps, so they shouldn't be very microphonic. (Any capacitor will exhibit some degree of microphonics.)
I've given up trying to explain these effects. Most of you will just dismiss it as the perversions of the human mind when sighted tests are conducted. That's fine, I don't care. You are wrong.
I have put in my 10,000 hours and I know what I hear. I have conducted many blind tests and many sighted tests. The results are always the same, although the added stress of the blind test just makes the test take longer. People that put in 10,000 hours buy our equipment because it sounds good to them. People that haven't put in their 10,000 hours are satisfied with cheaper equipment. That's fine. Our equipment isn't for everybody. It's impossible to be all things to all people all of the time.
Charles Thorsten, Have you never had a friend or good customer who just didn't hear it with you there? Or I am reminded by the Fremer/Carver adventure. Mike has probably put in 50000 hr. and by his own statement could not hear the difference. That Carver amp and resistor would save folks a lot of money. I have listened with some of the big magazine reviewers, you have to be kidding.
As long as I don't hear it, in my reality YOU are wrong. You force the issue of relativism, which does not matter in the end since I have never heard two "serious" systems that sounded the same (often dramatically different).
As long as I don't hear it, in my reality YOU are wrong. You force the issue of relativism, which does not matter in the end since I have never heard two "serious" systems that sounded the same (often dramatically different).
Charles Hansen said:
So, you're saying that these two preamps where so identically matched - parts, component values, output level - that the biggest difference between the two, to your ears, was the wood blocks under the power supply?
There's also been lots of tests demonstrating that people's ear/brain can be easily tricked. My dad prefers a one dollar interconnect to his Oval Analysis silver cables as long as he thinks it's the Oval Analysis. Doesn't mean there is no audible difference though.
I happen to think that the ear/brain is exceptionally good at detecting even small differences, but people make mistakes.
John
That is exactly correct. If you don't hear it, you would be a fool to pay for it.
The problem comes in when people try to tell other people what they can and cannot hear.
I hope that I have never tried to tell you what you can or cannot hear. But there are many on this forum (not necessarily you) that try to tell me what I can and cannot hear. That is sheer madness. Not to mention demeaning, belittling, and infuriating.
I don't need a piece of test equipment to tell me what I hear any more than I need a piece of test equipment to tell me what food I like, or if I can tell the difference between French's mustard and Dijon mustard.
And the same goes for double blind testing. As someone pointed out, double-blind testing gave us the MP3. I would rather occasionally make a mistake in my sighted tests (which I rarely do) than fall prey to a mindset that gave us MP3.
Subjective reviewers are open minded, and the best of them are usually correct. Here's an old example. When DVD was released, many serious reviewers that were both audio and video enthusiasts were very skeptical. They had been burned by the CD hype before and were extremely wary of the shift from the (largely) analog LaserDisc to the fully digital DVD.
But they admitted it. They immediately said (even with the first generation players and before progressive scan was introduced) that the picture quality from DVD was markedly better than LaserDisc. However they also noted that the compressed Dolby Digital (essentially six channels of 92 kbs MP3) sounded far worse than the uncompressed 48/16 digital audio of later LaserDisc releases.
They didn't need a test instrument or a double-blind test to tell them that their preconceptions were wrong. They could see (and hear) it for themselves. It's really not rocket science.
And, I'm saying that it's a mistake to ignore that aspect of how our hearing works. Or people design things like the Tice Clock.
I'm one of the trust your ears folks, to an extent, cause I don't do blind testing. But, I do draw a line about what I'm going to worry about. I don't just say just because I heard it means that the difference is real.
You know, I've found with a little cognitive brain therapy the mind is also a great tone control.
Helps with some bright sounding recordings.
Testing blind DOES mean trusting your ears. It's when you refuse to do it that you're relying on your eyes and your preconceptions. For me, that would be intellectually dishonest- I'm a curious kinda guy and if I hear a difference that ought not to be there, I actually want to know if it's real or a figment of my imagination (my 10,000+ hours of critical listening notwithstanding).
But I don't have a financial or emotional stake in the outcome, other than my own intellectual satisfaction in finding things out. If anything, I'm biased toward finding out something interesting- it's publishable, and what little income I've derived from audio has come from writing.
If something measures 6dB down at 10kHz and I think it sounds kind of dull, I wouldn't bother setting up a blind test. But if I thought I heard a difference when a cord is put up on a wooden block, I'd sure as hell investigate, rather than dismiss likely explanations out of hand.
But I don't have a financial or emotional stake in the outcome, other than my own intellectual satisfaction in finding things out. If anything, I'm biased toward finding out something interesting- it's publishable, and what little income I've derived from audio has come from writing.
If something measures 6dB down at 10kHz and I think it sounds kind of dull, I wouldn't bother setting up a blind test. But if I thought I heard a difference when a cord is put up on a wooden block, I'd sure as hell investigate, rather than dismiss likely explanations out of hand.
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